One of the things my family used to love every December was the steady trickle of Christmas photo cards in the mail. The kids and I washi-taped each family’s or friend’s photo to a growing collage in our dining room. All year long, loved ones smiled on us until we replaced them with new photo cards the next year.
Our first Christmas on the mission field, our walls were bare. We were still building our community from scratch, and no one sent photo cards.
Missionaries grip what appear to be contradictory realities. In one hand is the immense privilege and joy of gospel ministry; in the other is the very real loss of home and loved ones. Of course, no two missionaries are exactly alike, and no two areas of service are alike. The challenges vary person to person and place to place. But for those already suffering, Christmas and the holidays can accentuate their tender spots.
Over the years, my family and I have made large strides in building local relationships, but Christmastime continues to spotlight the near-constant loneliness I feel as a foreigner and follower of Christ in my surrounding culture. Even so, as I celebrate Christmas far from home, I have learned more fully the goodness of our promises in Christ.
He Is with Us
As missionaries, we will never fully belong in the places where we live. The nations will not fully embrace us as their own. At best, we can hope to be acceptable outsiders. At the same time, families back home may not support us, and time apart inevitably begins to erase the lines of past friendships. Sandwiched between a lack of understanding and a lack of perceived care, missionaries can feel even more isolated.
No one understands better than Christ what it means to leave the comforts of home for the gospel’s sake. Coming in our likeness, he understands the cost of becoming all things to all people. He understands rejection by those for whom you lay down your life. He also understands that it is our food to do the will of the One who sends us, even if it involves a cross.
The very first Christmas, our Messiah came to us with the name “God with us” (Matthew 1:23), and among his last words were, “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). He knows his people can live and go forward only with the confidence that he is with them. We who have felt the pain of leaving home and relationships for the gospel’s sake can feel the full force of this promise. Even when our circumstances and emotions tell us the opposite, he is with us always.
He Is Our Hearth and Home
Christmas began around a humble manger, far from home for Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. In recent centuries, the West has linked Christmas with a different picture: the grand fireplace trimmed with stockings, the curated tree balanced above dozens of presents, and a feast complete with winter’s best comfort foods.
Contrast that sketch with missionaries serving where persecution, displacement, poverty, unrest, or even normal days of work and school can be the realities of Advent. Missionaries stake their hope to something better than earthly hearth and home. They live in a strange in-between, where neither their new cities nor their old ones feels entirely like home. However, like their older brothers and sisters of the faith who acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth, they know their final refuge is not a place limited by language, culture, time, or space. Their hearth and home is the eternal person of God himself. He alone is their “dwelling place in all generations” (Psalm 90:1).
Beneath our temporal desires at Christmastime, we desire something better than Raleigh, Houston, or Los Angeles. We desire “a better country, that is, a heavenly one” — and (praise God!) he has prepared one for us (Hebrews 11:16).
He Is the Bringer of Joy
This does not mean we are immune to sorrow and stress, nor should we pretend to be. Our Father remembers our frame. He knows we need him, and his ears are open to our cries (Psalm 34:15).
In moments of acute pain, when the grief of what I left behind overwhelms me, or hardship threatens to undo me, I often whisper through my tears, “Father, remember this. Remember this to my account. See my pain. See my tears. Remember, this is for you.”
We can fight the good fight, endure hardship as good soldiers of Jesus Christ, and cry in our Father’s lap, “This is hard.” Our brokenness does not repel him; in it he draws near (Psalm 34:18).
Last Christmas, in a culture that neither knows nor celebrates Christmas, we invited our small church family to dinner. On a normal weekday, they bused, carpooled, and taxied to our home. Among the millions in our city, God has set them apart to be his sons and daughters. They are the firstfruits of the harvest to come from their family trees. They are not as numerous as the loved ones whose photos we used to tape to our dining room wall, but we expect that one day they will be a hundredfold to the glory of God.
We are currently in birth pains, but oh, the joy that is coming.
Desiring God